15-Sep-17: Women, children, parliamentarians, editors and terror

Busy members of the Palestinian Legislative Council [the image is
from 2007 - Source]

The Palestinian Arab terrorist enterprise occasionally drops its guard and allows some of its semi-concealed lethal malevolence to be exposed to the light of day.

Here's an extract from a media report of a heavily-promoted publicity release issued yesterday (Thursday) by several NGOs that agitate for the rights of Palestinian Arab prisoners:

Throughout the month of August, Israeli forces arrested 522 Palestinians, including 130 children, according to a Palestinian human rights organization reported on Thursday. The scores of minors, as well as 16 women, were arrested across the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem, a report jointly issued by the Palestinian Prisoners Club, Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association (Addameer) and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs (CDA) said. Since the beginning of 2017, nearly 3,800 Palestinians have been arrested and 6,400 Palestinian prisoners are currently being held in Israeli jails. This number includes MPs, women and children. [Daily Sabah, published in Turkey, September 14, 2017]

(Wikipedia says Daily Sabah - the word means morning - is regarded as a propaganda outlet for Turkey's media-tough government and Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). In March 2017, after investigating complaints that the paper had an editorial agenda of "spreading hate", the president of the European Parliament banned its distribution there.)

Video grab from a Pal Arab source

The focus of the report and the message of its promoters in obviously concerned with arousing outrage at the notion that barbaric Israelis would consider imprisoning children, women and (gasp) members of parliament.

Do they want readers to know the background? Evidently not.

• Members of Parliament? Goodness, how do those busy MPs manage to tear themselves away from the daily gruel of parliamentary law-making and oversight for the benefit of those who elected them? Terrorism can be so time-consuming. But they do! We may never know how since the Palestinian Authority parliament has been inactive for more than decade after being formed in 1996. (For some valuable insight from an Arab perspective, see "How Palestine's parliament is squandering millions of dollars", Ahmad Melhem - Al Monitor, February 10, 2016). An announcement was made this past December ["Palestinian parliament to hold first session in a decade"] that those overworked, publicly-funded officials were going to take part in the Palestinian Legislative Council's "first session in a decade". As far as we know, it never happened. It has been more than a decade since its last session. MP's salaries, of course, continue to be paid. None of this, obviously, is mentioned in the Daily Sabah article.
• Women prisoners? As people who pay more than the usual degree of attention to Palestinian Arab terror, it's evident to us that some of the most vicious sociopaths to have been detained and accommodated inside Israel's security prisons are females. Can't think of a more egregious example than the woman - aged only 21 when she embarked on a life of homicide and terror - who murdered our daughter Malki and the other fourteen humans whose lives were stolen in the bombing attack on Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria. Ahlam Tamimi, who now lives in total freedom in Amman, Jordan, with her husband and toddler son, masterminded that massacre and has never stopped boasting publicly about it. It's propelled her to the status of celebrity jihadist and a figure of wide Jordanian admiration. If and when the FBI eventually catches up with her (she features on its Most Wanted Terrorists list), will those Turkish editors try again to arouse anguish at the way woman terrorists are treated? And what do they say about women victims like our Malki, who was murdered at the age of 15?
• Child prisoners? The active incitement to kill and be killed that emanates from the highest echelons of the Palestinian Arab power pyramid has long been channeled in the specific direction of children [Palestinian Media Watch offers an exhaustive and ongoing overview.] And if we're already addressing this most shameful of inexcusable offences by the rich and manipulative geriatrics who run the Palestinian Authority, let's clarify that very young children, even toddlers, are a major target of the PA propaganda machine: see for instance "On PA televison, young kids incite to violence against Israelis", Times of Israel, February 1, 2017. Daily Sabah could have focused, but didn't, on the unique enabling role in this disgrace that's taken by one man: PA president-for-life Mahmoud Abbas ["Abbas: ‘We Welcome Every Drop of Blood Spilled in Jerusalem’", Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2015]

The pain of the imprisonment of MPs, women and children falls much more heavily on the Palestinian Arab side than on ours. But then so does the responsibility for trivializing the awful deeds that create a society-wide culture of terrorism. Do the editors at Daily Sabah understand the small enabling role they play in that? Are they bothered?

14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers

From the UK Parliament's website

Here's a good news/bad news story. On Sunday, one of Britain's mainstream newspapers ran a major report that opened with this startling sentence:

A multi-million pound foreign aid project aimed at promoting Palestinian state building and peace has instead encouraged terrorism and led to an  increase in violence, The Telegraph can disclose. 

The article ["Multi-million pound foreign aid grant spent on encouraging terrorism", Telegraph UK, June 12, 2016] refers to an "official report" into a grant of some £156.4 million provided by the Department for International Development (DFID) to the Palestinian Authority. The context is a debate into the wisdom of Britain’s formal pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of its income on foreign aid. The parliament engaged in this yesterday (Monday). Daily Mail UK gave space last night to this formal defence of the British strategy:

International development minister Desmond Swayne insisted that money given to the Palestinian Authority funds specific civil servants, helping to prepare a government in the event of a two-state agreement... [He] insisted ‘British taxpayers’ money does not fund terrorism’ and defended the thoroughly scrutinised list of aid recipients. He said: ‘Our taxpayers’ money goes to build the Palestinian Authority so that it is able to morph into the government of a Palestinian state when that opportunity arises and we pay named civil servants for the provision of public services.’ 

It's a pathetic, old and by-now discredited line of self-justification. Now there are fresh reasons for rejecting it. The "independent evaluation", says Telegraph UK's report, "suggested" that this generous gift of British taxpayer cash has

led to civil servants being “more likely” to commit acts of terrorism... [T]he five-year project encouraged public sector employees to engage in "active conflict" since their salaries were paid to their families even if they were convicted and imprisoned for criminal acts, including terrorism... On completing jail sentences, civil servants were able to return to their  jobs which had been “kept open when they return from detention”, and  continue to draw a salary funded by the UK taxpayer... DFID’s grant failed to “promote peace or peaceful attitudes” and appeared  to lead to an increase in violence among Palestinians... [T]he more foreign aid money was spent on public sector employment, more “conflict-related” deaths occurred.  

The analysts who wrote this took an econometric view of the evil done with British money:

An increase in public sector employment by one per cent is associated with  an increase in fatalities by 0.6% over this time period." [Expressed in terms of an] “opportunity cost” hypothesis [this means" "conflict, and therefore fatalities, are more likely when the opportunity  cost of engaging in conflict is lowered... For public sector employees, the opportunity cost of conflict is lowered  as their employment will be kept open when they return from detention, and  their family will continue to be paid their salary.” 

Not too many people have looked at the Rewards for Terror phenomenon that way till now. We should. They should.

The Telegraph quotes a senior parliamentarian, Sir Eric Pickles, taking down the Palestinian Authority as "the cheerleader to acts of violence to, at worst,  the operator of a revolving door policy for terrorists... [operating] an  equal opportunity employment policy for convicted terrorists". He restrained himself. 

He is quoted, as well, in a Daily Mail UK report from yesterday, making a key point that Norway's government ministers have self-defeatingly failed to comprehend [see "04-May-16: The PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: Abbas, fobbing off Norwegian criticism, incriminates self"]

[F]unding sent to the Palestinian Authority is used to free up money to pay prisoners who have committed attacks in the Israeli conflict.

It's an important point. Sir Eric added that there were "worrying reports" that certain British charities were "promoting violence on social media pages", and added this common sense observation:

"Surely it is not unreasonable to ask the minister and officials to check what is going on, and to say if you’re going to receive money from the British Government you should unequivocally denounce violence in all its forms... I don’t think it’s unreasonable in times of stringency that we should address the quality of that aid as well as the quantity..." [DailyMail UK]

The author of the official report to the parliament is Overseas Development Institute, "...the UK's leading independent think tank on international development and humanitarian issues" with a mission "to inspire and inform policy and practice which lead to the reduction of poverty, the alleviation of suffering and the achievement of sustainable livelihoods in developing countries". 

It's a pity their services were not sought at an earlier point.

The reality "disclosed" by the Telegraph is not good news, of course. It's tragic at multiple levels. British cash, in very large doses, are found - long after they have been handed over and spent, and despite endless public assurances that nothing could possibly ever go wrong because of all the care being taken to ensure happy endings - to be the enabling factor behind malevolent activities of the most horrible kind - the kind that bring tragic deaths, maimings and despair into the lives of innocent people. 

What's good in a relative sense is that these things are finally being said, and in a serious place, the parliament at Westminster. 

Much less good is that, as "disclosures" go, this is not news. There's evidence of that in many past blog posts of ours - these three for instance (four and five years old) among many others and naturally we're not claiming to be the only people who knew: 

• 20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?
• 28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea.
• 4-Sep-12: Where's the shame? How much of your tax dollars went to fund the pension of our child's murderer? More than you probably thought

We were glad to see that another parliamentarian, Joan Ryan, made that point. The ODI report and its findings, she said to the parliament,

“adds to the mounting concerns about the support  which DFID [the British government's foreign aid agency] is providing to the Palestinian Authority”, and that she has “no  confidence” in DFID's internal review into UK spending in the Palestinian territories. “This is an issue which has been put to the department repeatedly over  recent years and which it has consistently and repeatedly failed to act  on," she said. 

The reality is the money is gone and cannot be unspent. 

And there's more being spent on identical programs at this very moment by the very same people. 

And not only by the British government, enabled by its mostly-trusting and unwitting taxpayers, but by numerous other governments, mainly but not only in Europe, enabled by their taxpayers. 

For British readers seeing our comments for the first time, please know we can offer plenty of context. 

And be assured we don't approach this with clinical coldness. We are passionately, furiously determined to expose the evil that British funding has done to people like us (yes, literally like us): 

• 13-May-16: Ongoing gullibility: UK foreign aid and the Palestinian "Rewards for Terror" scheme; 
• 20-Apr-16: Parliamentary committee says UK govt doesn't fully know how taxpayer funds are spent; 
• 13-Apr-16: Parliament will debate UK funding of the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme; 
• 12-Apr-16: Wasted lives, stolen futures, obfuscatory answers; 
• 31-Mar-16: More on UK funding of Abbas' Reward for Terror scheme; 
• 28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?; 
• 27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad; 
• 27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in. 

And numerous others as well that are listed in this post from October 2015.

12-Apr-16: Wasted lives, stolen futures, obfuscatory answers

This Ben Wiseman illustration accompanied a
New Yorker article "Trafficking in Terror", published
December 14, 2015

If you have been following the media coverage of rising British outrage over evidence of the wanton abuse of the substantial sums of British taxpayers' funds handed over by the UK as foreign aid, you will know that the Daily Mail has focused on 

"the absurd new legislative requirement to give away 0.7 per cent of national income... [and in particular] payments to Palestine [that] seem a classic example of the core aid problem of "fungibility" - when foreign cash supporting public services frees up a regime to spend money in other questionable areas, which all too often fuels conflict or corruption."

A parliamentary question touching on much the same issue was asked in London on March 24, 2016.  Yesterday in Westminster, it was answered. And with everything that's wrong with the response, it actually tells a lot. 

That enquiry was directed at the UK's Department for International Development and from the transcript [hat-tip to MH for directing us to it], it concerned "Palestinian Authority: Overseas Aid: Written question - 32482". Here's the verbatim text of the to and fro [via this online source]:

John Howell: 

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what reports she has received on the use of aid disbursed to the Palestinian Authority for purposes related to terrorist activity.

Mr Desmond Swayne:

UK direct financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority (PA) is used to pay the salaries of civil servant and pensioners. Our support is provided through a multi-donor trust fund administered by the World Bank, which carries out close monitoring of PA expenditure. Only named civil servants from a pre-approved EU list are eligible, and the vetting process ensures that our funds do not benefit terrorist groups. The process is subject to independent auditing.

We don't know much about the questioner or the answerer. But from a quick Google check, it appears the Right Honorable Mr Desmond Swayne MP has been the UK's Minister of State for International Development since July 2014. So he's the man who most needs to have good and accurate answers. 

Mr Swayne's official UK Government bio page [here] and his Wikipedia entry say he spent years in his pre-politics career doing risk management at Royal Bank of Scotland. So he may actually understand better than other MPs how dangerous it is to claim that "vetting" of the treacherous terror-addicted Palestinian Authority with a documented history of decades of corruption could ever deliver a clean bill of health for British taxpayers who fund it. 

As for relying on "independent auditing" or the administrative services of the World Bank (motto: "Working for a World Free of Poverty"), is Mr Swayne serious? What does his answer and its reference to un-named auditors issuing unpublished audit reports at unknown intervals and issuing unstated conclusions even mean?

But what worries us even more than the scant details is the hubris that underlies it. We wonder how any politician can sound so confident when faced with deep concerns by taxpayers whom he is obliged to represent about the possibility that they are funding acts of murder and encouraging even more of the same. 

It's baffling.

Question time in the UK parliament [Image Source]

But - and keep in mind that underneath all this polite political talk, the real subject is the murder by Palestinian Arab jihadists of innocents like our daughter Malki - it's darker than that. 

Though it's been going on for a decade and a half and involves oceans of euros, dollars and pounds, there has only ever been one solitary authentic audit of European aid-funding to the Palestinian Authority, a scandalous situation in its own right. That audit report, made public in December 2013 [full text here], revealed startling things that ought to disturb all the honorable members of the British parliament and not only Messrs Howell and Swayne. For instance -

1. EU aid to the Palestinian Authority worth billions of euros needs an "overhaul" and major changes in some areas, the bloc's Court of Auditors said... If the circumstances are difficult, there are still "a number of aspects of the current approach in need of an overhaul," said Hans Gustaf Wessberg, who wrote the report for the court. "There is a need for major revisions such as encouraging the PA to undertake more reforms"... [EUbusiness, December 12, 2013]
2. "The EU should stop paying the salaries of thousands of Palestinian civil servants in the Gaza Strip who are not going to work... They called for a major review, saying money spent on civil servants there should go to the West Bank instead." BBC, December 11, 2013.
3. "It is difficult to ensure that EU money is not misused or does not become a drip-feed, it said... The PA is not undertaking all the reforms that the EU would like. At every turn there are political causes and factors. The audit is therefore a political minefield." [European Voice, December 12, 2013]

And that's certainly not all. 

Immediately after the audit was publicized, the chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control - a man whose official role probably causes him to think about things like public corruption, financial controls, and checks and balances more than most of us and who most certainly has more information than we do - wrote an articulate call to action. 

In an important, but probably little noticed, article in the Wall Street Journal, he reminded the world that the EU's auditors had found "major dysfunctions" in the way the Palestinian Authority were getting and spending their foreign aid Euros. He called on the EC to impose benchmarks and conditions on the Palestinian Authority as a condition for getting more EU gift money:

These should include improving the state of human rights in the West Bank, cracking down on corruption and cutting off subsidies to convicted Palestinian terrorists. In these hard times, Brussels shouldn't tolerate blatant misuse of EU taxpayers' money. [WSJ, April 9, 2014]

Unless the Brits know of very recent PA reforms and fixes that have (if they happened) gone unreported, you have to wonder how the person who composed yesterday's parliamentary response and/or signed it off on so that Desmond Swayne MP could deliver it could have dared. 

Getting back to where we started, an online petition [here] that the editors at the Daily Mail have promoted calls on the British government to change policy immediately and to hand over foreign aid funds

only for truly deserving causes, on a case-by-case basis...

The petition says the UK government "responds to all petitions that get more than 10,000 signatures". As of this morning (Tuesday), it had already attracted nearly twenty-two times that number. It's become a major expression of public outrage that will have to be addressed. And it has far-reaching consequences that go well behind the British Isles. 

Paraphrasing what we wrote in an earlier post, the ongoing lethal fraud perpetrated by the conniving Palestinian Authority to hide its Reward for Terror scheme (that's not what they call it, but that is exactly what it is) could simply never happen without the active involvement of (at least) many hundreds of European politicians and bureaucrats - some of them British - in funneling the indispensable cash which enables it.

We offer some background in four posts we published in the past fortnight:

• "27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad" 
• "27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in"
• "28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?"
• "31-Mar-16: More on UK funding of Abbas' Reward for Terror scheme".

A detail from the same illustration that appears
at the top of this post

We noted a while back ["13-Oct-13: Massive scandal in Palestinian Arab financial affairs? No!"] that there was one aspect of the European/UK saga of PA-centred corruption and dishonesty that was truly beyond our comprehension. It still is, and it's this: how can the members of the news media who cover the EU and the Middle East conflict have allowed this financial scandal (one that everyone has known about for years) to get so little media coverage? How much of this conspiracy of silence is based on intimidation?

If you are a member of the British parliament, or know someone who is, please feel free to share the fury. As a family personally affected by this in the worst possible way, we believe passionately that this scandal, and the reams of open-source information that documents it, has been going on for far too long ["4-Sep-12: Where's the shame? How much of your tax dollars went to fund the pension of our child's murderer? More than you probably thought"]. There have been too many innocent victims and far, far, far too many unjust beneficiaries. They include the members of the Palestinian Arab terror squad, one woman and several men, who were convicted of multiple murders including our daughter's in 2001, and who have for years received lavish payments under the nauseating Mahmoud Abbas Rewards for Terror scheme.  

It's time to shut this obscene disgrace down.

24-Oct-14: When not knowing what to say can be the most powerful message

The victim, standing guard, just
minutes before he was killed
[Image Source]

It doesn't take carefully crafted speeches. Expressing sincere remorse for terrorism when the perpetrator is someone from your country, your faith, your community or (as in this case) your family can be an astonishingly effective thing.

The mother of the man accused of killing a soldier at Ottawa's war memorial then storming Parliament before being shot dead says she is crying for the victims of the shooting, not her son. In a brief and tear-filled telephone interview on Thursday, Susan Bibeau said she did not know what to say to those hurt in the attack. Just before 10am on Wednesday local time (1am AEDT Thursday), a gunman shot and killed Corporal Nathan Cirillo and then opened fire on the country's Parliament buildings. "Can you ever explain something like this?" she said. "We are sorry." [The Age, October 24, 2014]

The power and clarity is breathtaking.

(Corporal Cirillo was standing guard at Canada's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier War Memorial in Ottawa on Wednesday when he was shot and killed by a masked gunman. There were two dramatic shootings in Canada's capital that morning, the second one occurring inside the Parliament.)

29-Jul-09: Is it naïvete? Is it ignorance? Is it confusion?

The good people at Honest Reporting ask:

"According to a recent New York Times article, Hamas has shifted from “rockets to culture war” in their goal to win popular support through “cultural initiatives and public relations.” Additionally, the Globe & Mail, Canada’s "paper of record," made similar statements recently claiming by some unknown veracity that Hamas is moving “towards moderation.” 

"Are these media outlets woefully naïve or willfully ignorant?

"If Hamas did truly adopt non-violent tactics, could the Times and the Globe please explain why late last week, two Hamas terrorists were killed while handling a bomb which was being prepared for use against Israeli forces? Could they explain why Hamas is currently digging tunnels next to UN facilities under the assumption the IDF will not target them during a future conflict? Could they explain why Hamas summer campers recently re-enacted the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and why its charter still calls for the destruction of Israel?"

And we ask:

Why does the Foreign Affairs Committee of Britain's House of Commons say in a report issued this past weekend (reiterating a call they made two years ago) that they want to initiate talks with Hamas? Is this because they are unable to share the view of the EU and the government of the US that Hamas is an organization of terror and terrorists? Are they unaware of those ongoing acts of terror, of Hamas' unrelenting hostility to Israel and Israelis, to the ongoing campaign of hostilities, kidnappings and acts of pure terror against Israel's civilian population?

What is it about terrorism that so confuses people?